


Not Gay as in Happy, Queer as in Fuck You

by femmethem



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pining, Underage Drinking, no actual ships just pining, ronan is gay and angry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:17:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7281367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femmethem/pseuds/femmethem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t know why the noticing sets his heart racing and has him itching for confession and a dozen Hail Mary’s, but he tells himself that he just feels guilty whenever he thinks about something other than his dead fucking father and the great fucking tragedy his life has become recently.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>essentially a character study of Ronan through the three people he's canonically attracted to</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Gay as in Happy, Queer as in Fuck You

**Author's Note:**

> For an enhanced reading experience, listen to this 3 song Sad Jam Stevens playlist I made: https://play.spotify.com/user/1293845551/playlist/3qysEVODVneZnp1bOxaUTF

Ronan is fifteen when he meets Richard Gansey III, and he can’t say that he thinks much of him that he didn’t think about any other Aglionby boy. The easy way he starts talking at Ronan before their Latin class starts, like it’s a given that anyone would want to talk to him, reminds him of Tad Carruthers. Unlike Tad, Gansey’s face does not immediately scream “Punch me!” so Ronan entertains his introductory small talk.

 Ronan is sixteen when his father dies and he moves into Monmouth Manufacturing. Every time Gansey pops into his doorway, hovering in a way that is distinctly fatherly even though his own father never fucking hovered, Ronan sees in his eyes a warring concern and happiness. Gansey is overjoyed to have him there, but he never wanted it to happen like this. Every time, Ronan stands to slam the door shut in his face and throws himself back on his unmade bed. Eventually he begins closing it before Gansey gets the chance.

The problem with Monmouth is the quiet. The Barns had always bustled and brawled with sound: Matthew and Declan wrestling on the floor of the living room, his mother making dinner down the hall, his father whistling as he approached the house after weeks away. In the span of a week, he finds all of the noise has whittled away to nothing. For months after, he finds himself unable to even listen to his old music, Niall’s music, unless he is blackout drunk and won’t remember it later. Even when he finds that shitty electronica makes a half decent substitute, the air still feels silent. He has too much open time and space to sit with himself, inviting the sort of self-reflection that Ronan Before had hated. He tries not to feel like a coward when his thoughts drive him out of the building and into the BMW, and usually by the fifth or sixth drink he succeeds.

He isn’t quite at that point on a muggy night in June when Gansey knocks on his door, invites himself in, and gestures for Ronan to throw him a beer from the twenty-rack at his feet. Ronan quirks a brow at him and instead makes a grand gesture of standing and hand delivering the sticky can to his friend. Just as Gansey goes to take hold of it, he whips his other hand out from its hiding place in his pocket and spikes the side with the key to the BMW.

Gansey sputters for a moment as beer starts to shoot from the side, and he places his thumb over the hole as a temporary stopgap. He looks at Ronan in disbelief.

“Tick tock,” Ronan teases with a knife-sharp grin.

Gansey appears to war with himself for a moment before shaking his head and bringing the can to his mouth. He comments, “Dick,” and then his mouth is around the hole and he is chugging like an over-ambitious frat pledge, Adam’s apple jumping with every swallow.

Ronan is positively gleeful. “I know you are, but what am I?” he sings, grabbing another can for himself. He stabs this one as well, and they shotgun their beers together. Ronan has more practice and finishes first despite his late start. When Gansey is done, he is panting and there is beer all over his square chin.  In a surreal sort of synchronized dance of reckless masculinity, they crush the cans and chuck them into the corner of the room without a care.

Ronan finds he can’t take his eyes off of Gansey as he wipes the bottom of his face on the shoulder of his polo. His breathing is slowing, but his pupils are blown with adrenaline, making his normally honey brown eyes pop out from his tanned face. Ronan thinks of Gansey after a long crew practice, Gansey’s grin lit by the bonfire in front of Monmouth. Ronan wishes he had another can to crush.

“What? Why are you staring? Did I get it all?” Gansey asks, pawing at his jaw.

Ronan whips away, back toward his bed and the beer. “Would I fucking tell you if you didn’t?” he snarls. He doesn’t look back at him until Gansey sighs out a much more Gansey-ish “I suppose not,” and folds himself on the floor in front of Ronan. Even then, he keeps his eyes on the foul watermelon polo his friend is wearing and not his energetic fingers that tap the floor at his sides or his usually perfectly groomed hair which is now sticking up at all angles. A flush of guilt hits him, and he decides to crack open another drink instead of sitting with it.

This is one of the things Ronan has had altogether too much time to think about since the move, since everything happened. He swears he didn’t use to notice these things, didn’t notice much of anything between tennis and music lessons and cow herding and all of the other distractions that used to fill up his days. Now that he does, he wishes he didn’t. He doesn’t know why the noticing sets his heart racing and has him itching for confession and a dozen Hail Mary’s, but he tells himself that he just feels guilty whenever he thinks about something other than his dead fucking father and the great fucking tragedy his life has become recently.

He feels the same familiar guilt when he is stopped at a red light next to a white Mitsubishi and Kavinsky rolls down the window to shout, “Will I see you this Fourth, or will you be too busy with the Third?” He makes an obscene series of gestures. Ronan shoves down the white hot flare of shame and embarrassment that rises in his throat. He doesn’t trust himself to answer, snarls and revs the engine instead. As soon as the light turns green, he is off like a shot. He catches the slightest hint of Kavinsky’s terrible laugh before he shifts gears a little too abruptly, and that must be why his heart is in his throat and his stomach lurches.

It’s probably been five miles since he lost Kavinsky for good, but he doesn’t look back and he doesn’t slow down. Ronan drives like he’s allergic to his rearview mirror. He thinks _forward, forward, forward_ , and when he hears Gansey’s voice in his head saying _Excelsior_ , he puts pressure on the gas until his mind is clear again.

He drives an extra twenty miles for good measure before hurtling off the road and into an open field, jackknifing to a stop. Ronan leaves the car running when he throws the door open because silence is unthinkable on nights like this. Even with the engine, the music, the cicadas of summertime, he can hear Kavinsky’s laugh and Niall’s voice and Gansey’s reprimand that he’s probably on private property right now. He has to move but he can’t drive any further, so he’s spinning and punching the air. The thought of how stupid he must look thrashing around in some hick’s backyard just makes it worse. He doesn’t stop until his heartbeat is in his throat and his lungs are screaming for air, and then he gets back in the car and starts the drive back toward Henrietta.

Objectively, Kavinsky is an ugly little rodent. His hair is the same brown as pondscum, and his face looks better when it’s half-hidden by his huge white-framed sunglasses. If Ronan wrapped a hand around his bicep, his fingers would meet his thumb and he isn’t sure he wouldn’t accidently break him. Not because he’s fragile but because he’d already done most of the work towards destroying himself. Ronan prides himself on being a straw that had broken a lot of camels’ backs, and he can never tell if he’s more excited or nervous for the day that K breaks. Kavinsky is only attractive like picking at a scab is attractive. When he throws Ronan a challenging look or a manic grin he holds it as long as he can, staring into those too-small eyes and thinking _ugly, ugly, ugly_. If he tells himself enough times, surely he’ll start to believe it.

Ronan doesn’t know when Kavinsky became such a presence in his life, maybe because he can’t remember a singular moment when he met Kavinsky. He isn’t sure they ever introduced themselves or had a “get to know you” conversation. Instead they had skipped right to being arch nemeses or goddamn frenemies or something.

Sometimes Ronan woke up in dreams with no idea of what had happened immediately before but with the feeling that he had been there for hours, and whatever he had with Kavinsky was oddly dreamlike in that respect. Whenever the thought occurs to him, his lip curls and he feels the need to go to sleep and not wake up until he has dreamed of something better than some second rate dick joke-cracking Bulgarian teen gangster. He usually just gets trashed instead.

Adam, on the other hand- he vividly remembers the first time he met Adam. When he saw him standing next to Gansey in the main room of Monmouth, he felt like he’d been plunged into an ice cold lake. Except it was a lake of spiders, and the spiders were on fire. In all of Ronan’s emotional wisdom, he labels this feeling “jealousy, then guilt over being jealous,” and whenever his wandering mind decides to revisit it or relabel it, he usually dives into the BMW and tries to leave the feeling on the side of the road.

Adam introduces himself like it’s a challenge, jutting his chin forward and sticking out a hand before Ronan is even within arm’s length. He slaps Adam’s hand in a low-five instead of the handshake he was clearly angling for, half because he’s mad that Gansey thought it was okay to bring him home and half to see what he’ll do. He is thrown for the briefest moment, but he recovers with a tiny false smile and turns back to Gansey, not exactly ignoring Ronan but certainly shoving it in his face that he has failed to get a rise from him. It makes him want to slam his fist into a wall. It makes him want to stick his hand in a blazing fire. It makes him want to try again.

He’s torn between locking himself in his room and staying out in the main room to keep an eye on Gansey and Adam. He chooses the latter. Ronan feels like an overprotective mom watching her kid’s first playdate which is unbelievably lame, but if he could stop feeling things just because they were lame, he wouldn’t have had an emotion at all in two years. He flexes his fingers to stop himself from clenching them into fists, and he flings himself into Gansey’s desk chair.

Gansey is working on the tail end of his patented Glendower rant, so Ronan takes the time to size up the competition. Of course, he knew of Adam Parrish as a general concept, everyone did. Aglionby wasn’t that big, and they didn’t accept scholarship students all that often, which basically made Adam notorious as the token poor boy on campus. He is not familiar, however, with Adam Parrish as a real person, capable of becoming Gansey’s friend.

Ronan thinks cruelly that he looks like the dirt he probably grew up in. He’s a darker brown than Ronan with large freckles all over his long nose and pinched cheeks. His sandy hair is cut awkwardly short, and even though his posture is actually rigidly, impeccably perfect, Ronan keeps thinking he must be hunched over. It’s like his personality is visibly cowering behind a shield of politeness. Ronan hates it so much it makes him curious, and that makes him hate himself.

Adam surprises him by not immediately changing the subject once the pre-rehearsed spiel is over. “Would they really go to all the effort to carry his body to the Americas?” he asks. His accent is less pronounced than most locals’, but next to Gansey’s moneyed Old South timbre he sounds positively backwoods.

Ronan decides it’s about time he break up The Learning Hour with Gansey and Parrish. “It’s fine, trailer trash. You don’t have to act interested.”

Gansey gasps, “Ronan!” in the way he does probably a dozen times a day. Any effect it once had worn off ages ago.

“It’s fine, really, Gansey. I really would like to hear more some time when I don’t have to work,” Adam reassures. The comment might be directed at Gansey, but he makes very intentional eye contact with Ronan as he says it.

He sneers back to cover up the weird hiccup in his chest. “Work. How novel.”

“For someone like you, maybe.” Ronan doesn’t know why, but he wants to prove himself to Adam, wants to tell him about the early mornings of his childhood at the Barns mucking out horse stalls and feeding cows. Instead, he knocks up his glare a few notches.

With the air of a referee, Gansey subtly places himself between the two other boys. The Gansey that had come out while he’d been talking about his king retreats back into hiding. “Adam, you did say you’d have to run at 4, right? It’s just about five of right now- how about I walk you out?” He is already herding the other boy, who allows himself to be distracted, towards the door

When Gansey comes back from helping Adam get his bike from the Pig’s trunk, Ronan is still sitting in the desk chair because otherwise Gansey would corner him in his own room for the Serious Conversation he can see coming from a mile away. He leans on the desk next to Ronan and pets the journal sitting on its surface in an absentminded gesture. “So,” he starts.

“Oh, let’s just get this over with, _Mom_.”

“I was just going to say that Parrish is nice. Isn’t he nice? Did I mention he fixed the Pig? It’s always refreshing to meet a fellow who’s good with his hands.” Gansey is practically swooning, and he would tease him for it if it wouldn’t open a can of homoerotic worms Ronan had been forcibly keeping shut for years. Instead, he settles for an apathetic grunt.

Gansey sighs and moves the hand that had been fondling the journal up to the side of his face. “Look, I don’t know if you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed today or if you feel threatened by him or something, but there’s really no need for this sort of behavior. In fact, I’d wager that if you gave Adam a chance, you’d really like him.”

That hits a little too close to home, so Ronan stands up and kicks the desk chair away. “And that’s a bet you’d lose,” he snarls, as storms out the door. “Don’t wait up.”

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of things:  
> 1\. i realized i over-identify with ronan lynch because we're both angry and gay and then i wrote this  
> 2\. how do you write adam parrish? i'm just not enough of a slytherin to get in his head  
> 3\. i finally made a trc-only blog so uh yell at me @transpersephonepoldma on tumblr


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